Manatee voters agree on one thing: Pandemic won’t stop democracy

Overall, Tuesday morning started off slow as polls opened at 7 a.m.

Within a couple of hours poll workers at Mixon Fruit Farms described the voting as “steady,” despite the largest mail-in voting numbers in the history of local elections, according to Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett.

Florida, for the most part, has a tried and true system for mail-in voting as the national debate rages on whether every state should initiate mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.

President Donald Trump praised Florida’s system, but Bennett said the president’s argument about mail-in voting is only half accurate, in pointing to Florida alone.

“The president is right on one side and wrong on the other,” Bennett said Tuesday morning. “He grouped all of us together and that’s not fair. Half of the states have been doing it right for a long time. We have the system down, the technology and we track every ballot going out and every ballot coming back.”

Bennett said the president is right to be concerned about the other half of the states, however.

“In Florida, you cannot get an absentee or mail-in ballot without requesting it,” he said. “Those states willing to send out mail-in ballots to every single person without knowing who they are don’t have the infrastructure set up to track those ballots. When those ballots start coming back, they won’t know who sent them back, so how do they vote them?”

Bennett said as an elections supervisor, it would be his duty not to comply with a mall mail-in system that can’t verify a vote.

Fortunately, Manatee County voters are used to the system, but Bennett does have concern for a small percentage of voters using the mail-in ballots for the first time because of the pandemic.

“I’m confident that we have 95 percent of the mail-in ballots already in our office,” Bennett said. “What’s interesting, there’s no real deadline for mail-in ballots other than they have to be in our office by 7 p.m., and those include any that are dropped off in our outside box by 7 p.m. For anyone who decided to drop theirs in the mail yesterday, we can’t control the U.S. Postal Service.”

Bennett said that wasn’t a knock on the mail service in Manatee County.

“I hate for them to take the heat,” he said. “The service in Manatee County has been outstanding. I don’t know what’s going on nationally, but we certainly have not faced it here in Manatee County.”

Bennett said it’s gone so well that, “I have every confidence we’ll post election results tonight by 7:30 p.m. even though we’ll make one final post office run later this afternoon or early evening. It’s gone really well.”

The slow start to voting Tuesday morning also wasn’t a concern for Bennett.

“It was a little slow in the morning but I think people were scared off early by the rain and figured they would go later,” he said. “I expect we’ll have a decent turnout, but I don’t think we’ll crack 30 percent turnout.”

Bennett was right. Late Tuesday, his office reported that 73,165 voters, or 27.9 percent of the 262,517 people registered to vote in the county, had gone to the polls.

Voters, in the meantime, may never agree on political beliefs, but those making their way to the polls on Tuesday did agree that nothing, not even a pandemic, should stop democracy in action.

“As citizens, we need to be proactive,” said Loretta McKnight who cast her ballot Tuesday morning. “People have paid a high price for females to vote, for all people to vote. We have to focus on that and I just praise God for it. It’s a shame what’s going on in this country right now and we have to stay strong in what we believe and there’s no better way to express your belief than with a vote.”

Missy Ness said she had no concerns about the pandemic while casting her ballot at Mixon.

Asked why she decided to come to the polls in person, Ness said, “I think it’s important to come out in person. I believe too many things are happening to silence our rights and I just feel more comfortable voting in person to make sure my vote is counted.”

This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 10:14 AM.